A Couple of Hyped Guys Sitting Around Talking

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A Couple of Hyped Guys Sitting Around Talking

Two icons of a mediated generation discuss celebrity, technology, and solitude as the ultimate radical act.

__Since the almost concurrent 1991 releases of their generationally defining works, Slacker and Generation X, director Richard Linklater and author Douglas Coupland have followed roughly similar career cycles. Rich's Dazed and Confused and Doug's Shampoo Planet and Life after God engendered little of the marketing feeding frenzy of their predecessors, but neither Rich nor Doug could entirely escape being influenced by it. Their upcoming works - Doug's novel, based on "Microserfs" (which first appeared in these pages last January), and Rich's film, Before Sunrise, about two strangers who meet while traveling in Europe - will both début next year. Doug and Rich seem so numb to the hype around their generational voices that discussing even the deconstruction of that myth is taxing for them. If others glom onto their thoughts, they say, so be it. Fine. Hollywood and New York, the film and publishing worlds, wooed them both after their first works came out, and while each had the chance to sport Armani suits and live in the land of fabulous parties, neither bit. Doug stayed in Vancouver; Rich stuck to Austin. Doug never sold his books to Hollywood, and Rich has yet to direct a Terminator spinoff.

Though they are good friends, Doug and Rich have not been interviewed together since they first met, three years ago, via satellite on CNN's Sonya Live. On a hot afternoon in Austin, Wired Managing Editor John Battelle got together with them to change that.

The scene: Rich's two-story headquarters, probably a dentist's office in a previous incarnation. Rich and Doug, both shoeless, are draped over two shag sofas, facing the television on which Rich often watches videos. Framed movie posters cover every conceivable wall space in Rich's office, many of them Polish one-sheets reflecting a time and place where art wasn't a commodity. Behind the sofas is an open area containing a ping-pong table.__

Rich: Do you either of you play ping-pong? People always assume things go to hell - but not ping-pong balls. Remember as a kid? Slam blam! The ball was broken in three seconds. But these days it's impossible to break a ping-pong ball. I bought about nine thinking we were gonna go through 'em. We haven't cracked one. And we play some serious ping-pong. Doug: I get so pissed off at people who say things are worse. There has never been a better year to live than 1994.

Doug: Better than ever. In Portland, Oregon, I got a copy of TV Guide from 1967, and I read out loud from it at readings, just to remind people how boring and bad and idiotic TV was back then. F Troop. But, you know, nowadays, on any given week, there are probably eight really good shows on. Rich: I have to confess, I haven't watched television since I was a teenager. I watch about 10 hours every two years.

Doug: You watch TV the way I watch it. People tape things for you.

Rich: Yeah. I just can't time my day around it. If it's anything good, I hope it'll filter back via videotape, like when Eric Bogosian is on Larry Sanders. Or it'll be available at stores. Like Tanner 88, the show Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau did during the 1988 elections. It was the most brilliant television ever. I missed it at the time, of course, but it came out on video.

Doug: I confess, I watch TV in hotel rooms.

But you guys met on television, right?

Doug: We met on CNN, on Sonya Live. Rich: We met via satellite. I was in New York, you were in LA. I like that, two towns neither of us lives in.

Doug: It was '91, summer.

Rich: Generation X had been out a couple months. And it was just starting to take off.

Doug: And I was just so grateful that someone would even pay attention to it. It was no overnight sensation.

Rich: Slacker was opening the same week. The way this stuff works is, like, my distributor and your publisher, they got together. They sent me your book. I don't know if they sent Slacker on video to you or something?

Doug: Yes. I was in Montreal at the time and we were watching it at a friend's place and going, "Cooooool! "

Rich: Somebody was saying, "There's a trend here or something." And it was like, OK, I'll read it. I was so relieved that I liked it so much. I'd never met Doug, I didn't know who he was, and I didn't know anything about it.

Doug: "Generation X" is now a cliché, but then the whole notion that there was some other group, some other way of perceiving the world that was different from Michael Douglas's baby boom, or Jane Fonda's baby boom - it was heretical. To a certain tiny bunkered group of boomers, it still is.

In '91 you guys were both what age?

Rich: 29. Doug: And baby boomers had been basking in that warm, red, French-fried heating lamp of publicity for 35 years or something.

Doug sits up and announces he's going for coffee. He pads downstairs to the parking lot, where a few of Richard's friends have set up an improbable cappuccino cart: "It's doing pretty well, actually," Rich says. "It doesn't take much to make culture in Austin." Doug comes back in with coffees and a ginger ale.

Of all places, why did you guys meet on Sonya Live?

Doug: I'd never seen it before - and haven't seen it since. Rich: Right after our segment they announced: "Well, thanks guys. Next, how to teach your cat to use your bathroom." And they showed a cat walking around a toilet seat. We were sandwiched in between cats peeing in toilets. But it was our 15 minutes.

Did something happen afterward? Any increase in fax and phone communication?

Doug: Not really. People assume that, like, one day Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder show up at your front door in a limo with a bottle of Veuve Cliquot, and say, "C'mon into the limo with us!" But it just isn't like that.

What's your take on the commercialization of what you've done? There seems to be an exponential difference between those who have actually read or seen what you do and those who know about it.

Rich: And those are the ones who speak the most authoritatively about it. They grab a sound bite and add on their own generalizations and simplifications. Doug: Slacker culture was even on The Simpsons. Commercialization of youth's been going on for 40 years now, so it's hardly some big new phenomenon.

Rich: Why don't we take a vow of silence for all time. A moratorium on Gen-X talk.

Doug: That's what I already do, more or less.

Rich: What's sad is that no one wanted to be part of a movement that would inevitably be parodied into stupidity. The ultimate counterculture act to this whole media-nugget life is to not pay attention to any of it.

Rich: You have to be a lot stronger to be that type of person nowadays. In previous countercultural movements - like the Dharma Bum '50s - the thrust was to find enlightenment, go Eastern in your thinking. That was an OK thing to strive for - people didn't make fun of you for it. Now even your best friends might have you committed. Culture doesn't answer many of our needs. It doesn't speak to the deepest part of us, the part that doesn't change generationally.

Doug sits up in his couch, suddenly animated. His coffee cup is empty. He's kicking into high-fiber idea mode.

Doug: The information culture you inhabit in the all-important 0-to-10-year-old age period molds the way you deal with information the rest of your life. That's where generations spring from, I think.

My parents grew up with radio and newspapers. That molds the way that they take in their information. I grew up in Vancouver, and Rich grew up in Texas, but we both grew up with bad '70s TV; there were no zappers, and you had to go up and change the channel. So you had, like, a half-hour attention span.

Whoever has the most energy to get off the couch and go change it gets to watch whatever they want.

Doug: Right. And computers were these huge Flintstone-like devices with punch cards. The year is 1961: insert a blank fetal diskette. "Initialize?" - "Yes." Then, zzzzzzzt: you're formatted, Buster, and so are a whole bunch of people born around the same time as you. The conversation turns to subjects eternal: Children. The Omen. Texas as world-serial-killings capital. Electronic wills. Mormon genealogical databases.

Aside from PCs, what was one of the major technological revolutions of the '80s?

Rich: Videos. That's amazing to me. I mean, god, in the early '80s if you wanted to watch Touch of Evil, and you lived in Bumfuck, South Dakota ... forget it, you would never see that movie. Now Rich is leaning forward. He's talking about movies, his favorite topic.

Rich: You can have instant access to any classic. Everyone takes that for granted now, but I still think that's amazing. There was that excitement, somewhere in the '80s when you realized what was going on and what that implied, that ability to exchange art and information. I remember thinking something huge was happening.

Doug: We are so lucky to have mass culture. Rich and I grew up in totally different geographical places. And we have more in common than we have not in common. What's gonna hold everything together in the absence of that? Ideology? That doesn't exist any more. What else? Religion? Everyone's got their own religion.

Rich (dryly): Well, that's damn optimistic, Doug.

Doug: Well, I'm optimistic. Until recently, as a society, we had stopped equating progress with technology. Now we've begun equating them again. There's a big cinder block stuck on the technology accelerator pedal, and we're only gonna go faster and faster, never stopping. I think technology is good once again. I missed good technology during the '70s and '80s, during the two decades when technology was baaaad.

But that optimism, it didn't really infuse your first defining works, right?

Doug: I actually think they have an optimistic note. Rich: Yeah, they're both dark, but optimistic in the abstract. I feel great when I see a work that's just so dark that you have to laugh. If you can totally articulate your darkest impulses, no matter how much it might disturb someone else - to me that's optimistic. Art shouldn't be judged on its overt message alone.

Is there anything in the media that you've seen about yourselves or your work that was completely, totally wrong, but that you kind of liked?

Doug: It's never right. Also, interviews are factual and unemotional - I don't like that. It's why I don't do them too often. Look at this interview - factual to whatever level, but not emotional. It's a misrepresentation of my universe, and that's inevitable in the interview process. Doug and Rich trade a few press nightmares. Rich tells of a photo shoot for Us magazine that left him literally wrapped in celluloid and feeling utterly foolish.

Rich: I never felt awkward with my position behind a camera. But I wasn't really ready to be a "personality." The whole Gen-X thing - how can you sum it up? What is it, 40 million people, and no one wants others speaking for them. Everything's a cliché, even to come out and say this generation doesn't want spokespeople. But yet, we're sitting here doing that, stating the obvious. It's like a snake eating its tail.

Doug: I'm left-handed. If I wrote a book about being left-handed, would I be the "official spokesperson for left-handed people"? No. In the end, there's nothing you can do that's not gonna piss off someone, so you can't even think about that. I think the biggest peril of modern times is being decontextualized. Someone has to be taken out of context before they can be minty-fresh and media-friendly.

But isn't success, in this culture, dependent on knowing how to deal with that reality?

Doug: You just do what you're gonna do and not try and pre-guess the outcome. The media is not manipulatable. That's one of the great myths of the 20th century. This gets Rich riled.

Rich: Let's not kid ourselves, the media can be completely manipulated. You don't think our government uses the media?

Doug: Wait a minute, this is something like Chomskyist paranoia, which I just don't believe in.

Rich: But it goes deeper.

Doug: OK, I guess if you look at nuclear weapons, for example, the media hype around them came about because governments had to justify spending so much on defense. If citizens weren't absolutely petrified of the nuclear threat, then the government couldn't spend billions of dollars in the Nevada desert. After the Wall fell, they quickly had to find sort of an intermediate villain ... drugs! The government does manipulate the media to its own end. So I take back my earlier statement that much.

Rich: And when the big stuff comes down, the media can use it to sink a president or not. Like, "Do we really want to pursue this Iran-Contra thing or not?" I don't think it's five guys having a secret meeting as much as it is the reflection of the general political thinking of the media gatekeepers.

Doug: I think that's sort of '80s. People don't pay attention to media lynchings any more.

I mean, The New York Times covers Whitewater ad nauseam, and no one seems to care.

Rich: Clinton's smoked pot, he's had marital problems, and - hey! - he wants a blow job every now and then. Who doesn't? It makes him the first real human American president. Which is a good thing. I think that was Nixon's problem, all those years. I mean there's a guy who never got laid.

Satisfied, both Doug and Rich resume a reclined state on their respective couches. Doug, who is completely slouched, says he might go out and get another coffee, maybe some food. Doug needs at least three coffee- and carbohydrate-fueling stops to make it through an afternoon. Rich, the mellow cat who doesn't drink coffee, stares toward the wall, thinking and nodding his head slightly.

Are either of you afraid of being spit out by the media process?

Doug: I just write. This is something that gets forgotten. I write very personal stuff, a distillation of something in my own life. (He pauses.) Hey Rich - here's an experiment. Get out a piece of paper, and write down a description of someone who is not you. Describe the anti-Rich - the complete opposite of yourself. Now, put that description in a box and come back in six weeks. Chances are, you'll open it and find a description of yourself. The fact is, it's impossible to write something, anything, without that creation being you. Rich: Exactly.

Doug: That comes through a film or painting or books or whatever. And that gets lost. I mean, you can't speak for anyone else. Even if you wanted to, it's mathematically, technically, systematically impossible.

Almost. People look for other people, whose ideas they think are cool, to glom onto. It's part of human culture to say, "Those are the ideas I ascribe to! Thanks for thinking 'em up." Essentially, you two have the roles of being creators of ideas.

Doug: Some job description.

What places interest you?

Rich: I don't want to go anywhere. Doug: The only places I'm interested in going are places where they make new ideas or culture, or intellectual properties are being generated. The West Coast mostly, Microsoft, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles....

Do you think we're post-Microsoft? No one company is going to create the future and give it to us on a plate. Don't you think the future's gonna be built bottom-up, like it always is?

Rich: Anything new and different has always come from the margins. But even though you are both margin surfers, you don't eschew the trappings of social celebrity, right? I mean, you don't just dismiss it.

Concerned with keeping the day-to-day workings of his life out of the media glare, Doug turns on his side, into the couch.

Doug: This is the stuff I'm not gonna say anything about.

Rich: Oh, c'mon, talk about that Hollywood party we went to that time.

Doug (Turns around and sits up): OK, just one episode then. Rich and I went to this party. Who was that with? It was with Jane and Michelle and Julia. It was described to us in advance as "a small outdoor barbecue."

Rich: Free food. Hibachi.

Doug: Wear rags - be casual. We were wearing what we're wearing now, which is just like shit T-shirts and shit pants. I mean, we looked like the Manson family driving through Bel Air, and there were, like, 15 valet parkers with Madonna headsets. And we drove up to the front entryway, and four doors were opened at once, and before we had a chance to realize our mistake, the car was gone.

Rich: Yeah, we were stuck. It was one of those $80,000 parties. (Puts on a TV announcer face.) "Your movie dollars at work."

Doug: And all these guests are dressed for the Academy Awards. We were the freaks.

Rich: Yeah, regardless of how casual LA thinks it is, it's really not. This is a Saturday night out, and they're decked.

Doug: A lot of first-namers there: Quentin, Uma, Winona. The evening was like, One night we were driving down Sunset Boulevard and fell into the Alice-in-Wonderland hole - and we were dressed for housecleaning. We later ended up at that all-night coffee shop eating Jell-O.

Rich: I don't think I had any Jell-O. But I had someone come up to me halfway through the party, this producer friend of mine, and he said, "I'm disappointed in you. What are you doing here?" Like I'm the outsider, you know, so I can't go where the wind of Hollywood might take me.

At this point Rich and Doug digress into a discussion of the party Rich is throwing that night for a bunch of friends. Beer, nonstop videos, and hours of ping-pong. Doug was going to fly back to Vancouver, but he decides to stay and hang out with Rich. They haven't seen each other in a while. They compare the party that night with the Hollywood version and agree that if they had to choose, they'd rather be in Austin. But they'd rather not have to choose. The conversation goes random. Scooby Doo. China. Vladivostok. Bruce Sterling. Sequels.

But you're suspicious of the Hollywood culture, right? The generation you purportedly speak for is so thoroughly mediated, it's suspicious of everything.

Rich: We all have a personal relationship with our own networks. I'm glad this generation is suspicious of everything. They're smart and media savvy. People say it's apathetic and cynical, but I disagree. We're not cynical, we're just not buying all the bullshit. If not being a mindless consumer is apathetic and cynical, well, fine. Doug: If you look at the population bell curve, it's shifted enormously to the right. Human beings live 30 years longer than they used to 100 years ago, so percentage-wise, adolescence, which used to be confined to a tiny little period, is now stretched out. The period in which one tries to locate one's identity as an individual in a cultural context is also extended. We expect wisdom of old people; in fact, all they do is drive Winnebagos.

Rich: But I think there's a lot more tolerance for various lifestyles at different ages. That's the good thing, right? Maybe that was the best thing about the media hype, like on Sonya three years ago. I had all these people living on couches tell me, in a very honest way, "Thanks a lot for making Slacker, 'cause you kinda validated a lifestyle, and it connected a bunch of us who were doing that." I even heard my dad at some social event talking to another guy about what his son was doing. The son had quit some job and was kinda drifting around, and his father was concerned. And my dad said, "Well, hey, maybe he's just having a good time and slowly heading off in some better direction." My dad would've never said that had he not seen Slacker.

Doug: Yeah. We're back at the beginning: There's never been a better year to live than 1994. Except for 1995. God, do I sound like a "Better Living Through Chemistry" industrial film, or what?